Are you as a CxO so focused on the tasks at hand that you don’t take the time to re-group and assess what is working and not working? Likewise, are you too focused to take the time to determine what in your operations is effective and what corrective action is needed on a ongoing, consistent basis?

Are you “operations bound” whereby your team members are out of bandwidth due to barely keeping up with ongoing marketing, sales, communications and PR production schedules?

Do you find the company getting further and further behind competitors capabilities, effectiveness, market presence as well as sales volume?

Are you behind on learning the latest capabilities and advances in digital asset management, marketing & content management artificial intelligence (AI), and how block-chain can help your effectiveness?

Per question #4 do you know how these advances can improve the effectiveness in your marketing, sales, PR, communications while simultaneously increasing profitable revenue while simultaneously reducing your operating costs?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above questions, you are really in need of a Marketing Process Improvement (MPI) initiative and an infusion of a ‘Saw Sharpening” process. The benefit of implementing this continuous improvement process is that your company will increase the chance that it will evolve into the envy of the marketplace in terms of team leadership, capabilities and overall market effectiveness.

The remainder of this blog is a short primer and motivator in getting your company to consider becoming a ‘Saw Sharpening’ organization focused on improving profitability, market share and overall shareholder value improvement.

Marketing Capability Tier Evolution

Complimentary to the first set of questions above:

Have you mapped out how capable your company is in terms of marketing, customer management, sales, etc. such that you can accurately place your company into a capability level as shown in the above chart?

Have you created an evolutionary road-map in order to mature your organization into a more capable and effective organization over time (i.e. lower expenses and increase profitable revenue) in order to leapfrog your competition and gain market share?

Can you accurately assess your competitor(s) capabilities such that you know where they are better than your company and in which specific areas?

The last set of questions are associated with answering whether you are aware of the entire landscape of capability improvement initiatives available to assist your company’s marketing, customer management, sales, PR and communications (refer to above chart). These questions are as follows:

Are you aware that business rules engine technology can help you automate your marketing campaign management process such that marketers do not have to be as manually involved (i.e. campaign set up, execution and post campaign results analysis)? This technology will save your company time and $$ by allowing your marketers to focus on all important marketing strategy vs. being ‘campaign jockeys’ and marketing production focused most of their time.

Are you aware that powerful and real-time analytic engines can help with channel mix optimization such that you are marketing to the most effective and cost efficient customer channel at all times?

Are you aware that leading Digital Asset Management (DAM) tools now have artificial intelligence baked right in as to help you manage, find and retrieve your digital assets across marketing, PR, sales, communications, etc. – all saving you time and enabling your content to be more compelling to your customers?

Associated with question #3, are you really aware of the benefits of Digital Asset Management (DAM) tools and how it can help you go to market more effectively and cost efficiently?

If you answered “no” to any of the above questions, then you are not performing adequate MPI or ‘saw sharpening’ to improve your performance longer-term. As an example of what you might be missing in not performing MPI and marketing saw sharpening, I laid out the benefits of adopting Digital Asset Management (DAM) tools which not only helps the marketing department, but also PR, communications, sales, etc. (Don’t read ahead and let me know if you were able to guess all 7 benefits of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution):

Eliminates the cost of lost or misplaced digital assets. DAM virtually eliminates the costs associated with losing valuable digital assets due to the robust and highly organized digital asset repository (via a highly logical DAM taxonomy) which enables marketers to find and (re)use digital assets quickly.

Improves Marketing ROI: Enables marketers, sales, PR, communication, etc to use the most effective digital assets that will produce the greatest impact and ROI.

If you answered “yes” to some of my first set of questions and “no” to many of the 2nd and 3rd set of questions and missed the some of the benefits associated with DAM tools, then you are a prime candidate to infuse an MPI or marketing (or overall) saw sharpening process into your company. Based on having helped numerous Fortune 500 companies establish this continuous improvement mindset, approach and process, I suggest the following:

Honestly assess whether your team feels as though your company is as capable as it needs to be – processes not too manual, error prone, ineffective, lagging as compared to competitors, wrong approach and strategy, inefficient tactics, etc.

Set time aside each week for team saw sharpening activities and to discuss initiatives you need to implement to improve capabilities and overall effectiveness.

Benchmark your performance in certain areas like e-mail open and click through rates, sales $$ per campaign, campaign cycle time and/or accuracy, Google ad-words performance, etc., net promoter score(s) and constantly challenge the team to improve incrementally as well as dramatically after the implementation of new capabilities.

Leverage a consultant to help you develop an evolution roadmap over 2-5 years for your company to attain market leader status including business case with investment and capability implementation plan.

Is your organization planning on launching a new brand or optimizing an existing one? If so, give me a call or e-mail me, I can help you implement a MPI or ‘Saw Sharpening’ process that would enable you to surpass your competition and bring your organization or agency to the next level of market effectiveness and excellence.

This is just one article of 42 total I have written on Customer strategy, CRM, marketing, product management, competitive intelligence, corporate innovation, organization excellence & change management – all of which I have significant experience in delivering for Fortune 500 companies. In fact, my blog is now followed by nearly 158,000+ world-wide and was just named one of the top 100 CRM blogs on the planet by Feedspot, alongside Salesforce.com, Infor, Microsoft, SAS, etc. – Reference this informative site here: https://blog.feedspot.com/crm_blogs/